Correlation analyses
As shown in Table 2, HRV was not significantly correlated with
RRStotal, Brooding, Reflection, BDI-II,
MASQdepression, or DASSdepression, nor
with Depressionstandardized. However,
RRStotal, Brooding, and Reflection were significantly
correlated with BDI-II, MASQdepression, and
DASSdepression, and
Depressionstandardized, indicating that the tendency to
ruminate was associated with higher levels of depression symptoms. There
was a significantly negative correlation between age and
RRStotal, Brooding, and Reflection, which means that the
tendency to ruminate gradually decreased with the increase of age.
Similarly, age was negatively correlated with BDI-II and
Depressionstandardized, respectively. The analyses with
gender as the grouping variable found that the HRV was lower in women
than in men (t (233.162) = 2.399, p = .017), and the
RRStotal (t (1148) = -3.618, p <
.001), Brooding (t (1148) = -3.649, p < .001)
and Reflection (t (1148) = -2.895, p < .001)
were higher in women than in men, but there were no differences in
BDI-II (t (342) = -1.006, p = .315),
DASSdepression (t (457) = .415, p = .678)
and Depressionstandardized (t (1019) = -.403,p = .687). Sex differences in depression could not be
investigated using the MASQdepression because all the
participants were female. In addition, there was a significant
difference in HRV between the types of physiological baseline
measurement (t (1187) = -2.060, p = .040), showing lower
HRV during resting baseline than during Vanilla baseline.